The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [503]
What angered Roosevelt in February 1909 was that shiploads of rabbits had been released on Laysan Island by a Honolulu slaughterhouse firm in the hope that these hares would get fat on the thick vegetation—then, when they were at their maximum weight, they would be killed for a shish kebab eaten at Honolulu luaus. The problem was that the rabbits were devastating the tropical ecosystem of the island. Rare plants were being eaten down to nubs.24 By issuing Executive Order 1019, Roosevelt officially banned such releases of rabbits. Preservationist discipline had arrived in the Hawaiian Territory. Because Laysan Island was so remote, however, policing it to enforce the law against plumers and rabbit raisers would be difficult. Since the entire Hawaiian Island Federal Bird Reservation was administered by USDA, which didn’t own boats in Hawaii, Roosevelt employed vessels of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service to patrol against poachers and rabbit breeders. The U.S. fish commissioner likewise was ordered to protect the new federal bird reservation, including the ocean whales, from commercial fishing and hunting companies.25
There was also an archaeological component to the Hawaii Islands Federal Bird Reservation. On the small basalt island of Necker, only forty-six acres in area, numerous religious relics had been discovered. Fifty-five “cultural places” were unearthed there. Many of the discoveries were stone enclosures designated as wahi pana (religious shrines) and filled with makamae (cultural artifacts). Supposedly, Necker Island had been the last refuge for a Pygmy-like race, the Menchune, who had been chased there by Polynesians. Over the centuries, native Hawaiians made Necker a sacred ceremonial site. In 1988, the George H. W. Bush Administration would list all of Necker Island on the National Register of Historic Places.26 Every square inch of the island—700 miles northwest of Honolulu—was an antiquities site.
Marine biologists today consider Roosevelt’s Executive Order 1019 a stupendous moment in oceanographic history because it preserved the great bird and seal rookeries of Hawaii from human exploitation. Now called the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, the chain continues to serve as nesting areas for more than 14 million breeding seabirds, waterfowl, wintering shorebirds, endangered turtles and seals, and legions of whales. It was Roosevelt’s counterpart of the Galápagos, a gift to marine biology, the world’s largest oceanic conservation area, where evolution was happening incrementally in a discernible way. Here, in the westernmost islands of Hawaii, the food chain remained intact.
Yet if you pick up a Hawaiian guidebook at, say, Barnes & Noble and thumb through the index, you probably won’t find Roosevelt’s name. This omission is based on Roosevelt’s never having visited Hawaii in a fishing craft, yacht, or naval vessel. But you will learn in Hawaiian guidebooks that Twain said that Oahu “beseechingly” haunted him, that Stevenson found the leprosy colony “a land of disfigurement and disease,” and that London had called himself a kama’aina (“child of the island”). Only Roosevelt himself, in his A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916), noted the importance of Executive Order 1019 to the marine biology of what he called “the western extension of the Hawaiian archipelagos.”27
Because Hawaii was a territory in 1909—it did not become a state until 1959